FARRAH FIELD
Farrah Field's poems have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Margie, Chelsea, The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and Pool, and are forthcoming in Sojourn and Another
Some of her poems
Intensities of Emphasis and Wonder
The sleeping one is erect and mumbles.
The room went
and his foot peeks outside the covers.
You leave his warm slumber
five minutes before the new hour,
stomach growling, and possible
moon somewhere. There's slight moisture
still. He'll later say he saw you leave.
The day will happen soon enough—
peanut butter sandwich, dropped knife,
tote bag of graded papers.
Flossing in a colder room,
planning Jefferson myth-debunking,
washing hair—the man's sleep stretches
without boundaries, rolled to middle,
as if it were his bed, thick lashes,
even beard, and no concern for pillow.
He doesn't know it's October and you are happy.
Mother Talks to Herself Before Hunting Her Children
There's no need to investigate kindness. You were
never a there, there back patter. You melted their
coloring sticks to the carpet and they trailed radishes
that ended at a pile of fortified bobcat poop.
They knew you were a witch before you told them.
For the first born, you wished her never to suffer illness.
Then you wanted all of them sick with fever so you could
wipe their sweaty arms below the blankets. The oldest
cared for them and you watched her from your mind,
wringing a cloth in cold water, resting to knit more cloths,
humming tunes you never taught her. You laughed
when you saw their little panties hung on the laundry line,
wind bobbing elastic legs-holes like a xylophone.
Everyone who thinks babies solve loneliness is wrong.
You washed your face with menstrual blood
until they caught you. Once they ran away, you realized
they were what you wanted all along. You had perfect people,
but you were biting the heads off, well, it doesn't matter.
Your daughters never needed you even when you forced them
The Future, Low and Weary
She was killing a piece for quite some time, nicknamed
it the
You step further into the hallway, jet-lagged, dragging her body.
Others' houses are thrilling, their reek of air and presence. Once
you hid in the doorway, startled Mother when she passed.
Once you went to Keats' house, where he was bled and liked
to sit in two chairs. The gone don't know they're gone,
know what they meant to a pillow. Even this one
with the unfinished tattoo on her ankle, vinyl dress on the floor.
Not feeling is an organized process of pools, Demerol, freeways—
a living fiction. Why has the death mask lost its tradition ?
Preservation is a picky thing; how effective is a face really,
save the expression of the Queen. You're friend, she's a goner.
You hoist her onto her bed and she will lie, saying nothing was ever
snorted. She'll need out as soon as she wakes—the dishes
with stuck cheese, coffee, chances at a straight flush, crumpled
twenty-dollar bills, the abortion. Everything is too heavy to handle,
even a body, those miserable days in school, the boots still in their box.
Never Leave a Rhinstone Unturned
The fancy singer chirps at her own boob jokes,
then sits in a white chair to sing about
a diamond-studded auto harp in her sparkly lap.
She's always been like that,
beginning poor and happy
then wigged and marveled,
a bride of future earrings
or ungraspable
stuck beneath her plastic finger extensions,
and talk of trucks like lovers gone away.
A show or isn't she—
unnecessary background singers,
purple curtains, rhinestone banjo,
the beauty-singer business quality
of this atlas of music and self-promotion,
lip-glossed storyteller, pretty songs,
and possible theme park braggart.
What hurts most here—
my sister wore a wig and stuffed chest
in Mama's cream-colored church dress,
and pretended to be the one-woman triumvirate:
glee, mascara, voice for fringes,
puffy sleeves, wireless microphone, and farmland
How to Break Into a Storage Facility
There were no secret instructions among their things.
It was as though their mother’s house collected
empty hairbrushes and white booted roller skates.
There were no girls to match the reading stools
and uneaten noodles. Nothing had fingerprints,
not even the duck eggs the mother threw
from the girls’ window. I guess they won’t need these,
she said. She didn’t refer to the girls by name.
The detective never worked the weirder cases—
kids being raised by wolves or kept hidden.
None of the neighbors knew there were children.
No one saw them go to school. Their mother refused
an APB. Troubles in the orange house were routine.
There were four piles of ashes found beneath the girls’ beds—
their pets. All this time, the detective assumed
children wanted to go home. Parents prepared
sleds or favorite meals. I don’t think you want to go down
there, the mother said when he approached the cellar.
Generally, mothers’ distraught nature enveloped him
and allowed him use of everything in order to bring
their children back. Millicent admitted four unreported,
missing girls. After the detective’s visit,
the gardener’s tongue was removed. Regardless,
information was slipped to him: call the teacher.
At home, he wrote the county for birth certificates,
before feeding his cat and dog. What would you do
if you found the girls. There are thousands of homeschool
teachers. He tried to hang his coat in the refrigerator.
Something in the new is world. From a branch
on the old willow, eight eyes were intent upon the glass.
The Girls Gather Around While He Sleeps
You’re not as smart as you’d like to be, but you’re smarter than you think.
The day has been long and you’ve accomplished less.
The crab-mauling scar on your foot hangs over the bed.
We picture you growing up on a shore.
Once a group moves from its habitat,
another group is changed.
We pushed the Bighorns further out
and we didn’t mean to do that.
We felt lucky to see them.
Living near people is like living inside.
You smell like our teacher.
She wrapped strawberry preserves and Brazilian nuts
in brown paper. You left them in your locked car.
The note that we wrote hangs above the nearby desk.
Helen Gale. We call her
You think you might be on to something.
Your arms are crossed as though you fell asleep thinking.
We wonder if you’ll sleep so soundly next to her,
if she’ll make pumpkin pancakes.
It’s easy to know when someone’s in your house:
listen for a tack being pulled from the wall and paper falling.
When you look for people smarter than you, you look for them.
There are four of us and when we move, eight steps are taken.
We can go no further than your pastures
because we arrived without a trace and no one can do that again
unless by vanishing. A mountain lion hunts your land,
but she doesn’t frighten us.
They say no one chooses their own mother,
but they’re wrong. We weren’t born like other people.
The Smartest Person in a Room Never Speaks
We don’t know how the sisters crawled out of the window,
the detective said, counting footsteps from the rocking chair
to the window, then from the desk to the window as if the girls,
scattered around the room, one by one got up and left.
The carpet looks as though it’s only been crept upon.
There are no impediments, even under the platform rocker.
Chairs and other furniture sit very wide apart. If a table held
cold drinks, they couldn’t be reached from any chairs.
Lincoln and his son hang above the fireplace hardware.
The girls call him “fourth boy”. They thought they would
catch Tuberculosis from the portrait. There were Revolutionary
soldiers in the family. The girls wanted to register their names.
Child-size chairs made the detective feel tall in an old way.
He stood in the bay near the Gothic Revival windows.
The four sisters were like deer taking a blooming rose
without any sign they had been there or would return.
The girls hung wooden boxes they made. Their teacher
let them work together, creating one piece at a time,
working without talking. Planning how all sisters plan.
They reupholstered a parlor chair with dark green denim.
No one knows how big houses came to exist, how anyone
could walk in on a daily basis, mount a war-period wall clock,
pollute the cold kitchen with pork dumplings, heat the toilet lid.
The detective wondered if the girls knew how to ride bicycles.
Four wool coats were gone. There was no need to console
the cross-armed mother, who made the detective nervous,
even after she suddenly went down to the kitchen, peered over
the Dutch door and sure enough, a porcelain leg.
We Left Before My Turn
We placed the leg outside the door and the rest
twenty miles in the wrong direction. Old doll,
false lead. Running away is easy
when you hardly talk to your mother.
She ate snails once. But did you see her chew them?
I’ve never seen her chew anything.
We didn’t speak until a week underground.
No one was stitchy. We measured time
by plastic cereal bowls. Our mother appeared
in the garden once. She ran a long nail
up my spine. You should keep a back like that
covered, she said. I’m the littlest. I asked her
what she was doing there. She had powder
on her face; I could see it in the hairs.
She said she’d been up for eight days.
I didn’t look in her eyes as she walked
circles around me. She said I’d never guess
what she was going to do with the turtle
wiggling in her hands, gasping for breath.
It was beyond shrinking into its shell, flaying
the air as though it could swim home.
That is the only time I ate dinner with her.
My orange suitcase smells like my duck.
Our mother probably smashed the eggs
by now. I wonder why she never arranged
baby-sitters for us. Because you had me, Matilda says.
She’s returned from the surface. It’s May.
A criticism on her book
Census mumbo-jumbo tells Americans that the average (more privileged) human being changes career types an average of seven times. To transliterate that statement: the average American with the normal amount of spoonfed opportunity gets all sorts of various jobs to pay the light bill – and thinks they are solely one thing – but they are at least seven things in the helix of a lifespan. Poets are different, however. Because in the
Farrah Field claimed, when I recently interviewed her, “Like Anna Akhmatova, I thought I was one kind of poet, but realized I was another. Two things were at stake for me--writing about Heather and making my poems do something they hadn't yet done.”
Heather is her sister and a recurring sort of device or protagonist in the book, also the victim of a brutal murder (in reality and the book). This is a key thing to stay aware of as Heather pops in and out like the kernel of a phantom haunting both poet and reader. A grandmother dies; phones explode; orgasms elude, deteriorate, and detonate.
Rising was unmistakably chosen by Tony Hoagland as the 2007
Once you will be lost in prayer
and will be found craving muffins.
Hope exists. It’s the taste of boy in your mouth.
[. . . ]
A child will die in your arms
and whiskey will disappear from your glass.
Your sister is a ghost with a broken skull.
You are allowed one good memory
in a pumpkin patch.
It’s an apotheosis of the surreal and the narrative, juggling skeletons inside the various closets of memories. Rising also requires the reader to laugh at the grotesque, the perverted, the grave and morbid. Field told me that she has an “unpuritanical attitude when it comes to writing about violence and sex; and I have a pretty sick sense of humor to boot.” At least she is self-aware.
Pieces like “The Telling” and “Your Lordship Spirals,” as well as “
A majority of the book is place-based. If an event or a memory is not explicated in
This tends to zip a reader into a centrifugal chaos but can also wrap a comfortable quilt around the reader’s sensibility. Overt sentimentality takes on its usual, angular, undervaluing shape in many poems as well. One of the best/worst poems in the book (worst, due to its sentimental hooks and best, for its politics) is “Hard Times in Animas Forks.” The awfully upright goes: “across my feet. At a mine shaft entrance,/I hear the voices of men who have worked/in the earth: we can’t withstand the soot,/the shitty wages, the constant collapse.”
Her endings are so fierce that it makes the poems’ beginnings and middles feel disjointed and contused. Basically, some feel like the endings were written first. There is also a second person drone in many of the poems that creates a mechanical ambience. And the role of the South is strong; without its grandiosity, Field begins to approach something like a Nietzsche without a
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